Chrysler Museum of Fine Arts
Norfolk, VA

February 20, 2026 – May 31, 2026
Special Exhibition Galleries

View exhibit details on Chrysler Museum of Fine Arts website.

The exhibition, Architects of Being: Louise Nevelson and Esphyr Slobodkina expands on the notion of artistic character and the invariable ways artists construct their personas, their practices, and their legacies.

Born just nine years apart in different regions of the former Russian Empire, Louise Nevelson (American, b. Russia (now Ukraine), 1899–1988) and Esphyr Slobodkina (American, b. Russia, 1908–2002) were both children of Jewish families who immigrated to the United States. Both had early marriages of convenience that were short-lived. Both women arrived in New York in the 1920s to study art. The parallels are poignant, including their fearless devotion to abstract art and the promotion of it, associating with mutual contemporaries as members of the American Abstract Artists group.

The exhibition comprises approximately 70 objects, including sculptures, paintings, assemblage constructions, collage, hand-sewn clothing, and jewelry, the latter alluding to the artists’ creative self-fashioning. Brought together in dialogue for the first time, Architects of Being reveals the architectural spirits of these two women as well as the ways in which they constructed their identities in a male-dominated, midcentury American art world. Overlapping themes of abstraction, installation, assemblage, and fashion, as well as migration and identity-building, illuminate how Nevelson and Slobodkina constructed legacies as bold, innovative figures in twentieth-century abstraction.

Louise Nevelson is quoted as once saying, “Character is the architect of the being.”